HIS SOCIAL HABITS AND POLITICAL TENDENCIES.—HIS EDITORSHIP OF THE “NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.”

My first personal introduction to Campbell took place in 1830, at the house of a person with whom, by one of
those temporary caprices to which, in his latter years, he so habitually yielded,
Campbell had contracted an intimacy as little suitable, it might
have been supposed, to his refined literary tastes and fastidious personal habits, as it
certainly was to the general tone of his intellectual character; for the person to whom I
refer, though possessing considerable talents and extensive influence in connexion with the
newspaper press, was a man of coarse mind, and of almost ostentatiously profligate personal
habits.

Not but there were features in Campbell’s mind and character capable of accounting for this
temporary intimacy. In the first

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place, it must be admitted that,
notwithstanding the excessive fastidiousness of his taste and habits in all matters
connected with his position and reputation as the first of living poets (for such at that
time he was considered), Campbell partook of that propensity to which
another kind of Kings are said to be addicted—that of a lurking fondness for “low
company;” not “low” in this case, in the ordinary sense of the term, as
implying persons of low condition and mean mental endowments, but as indicating that
freedom from conventional restraints which always springs from a low tone of moral
sentiment, when accompanied by an open and bold-faced repudiation of those principles of
personal conduct which form the basis of all cultivated society. And
Campbell’s mind had a strong tendency to throw off the
restraints in question, without the strength of will to do so, even if his high tone of
moral feeling had not stood in the way of the step—which it certainly would have done.

sincerity of his political views and opinions, and the daring and
uncompromising way in which he advocated them, both with his pen and tongue, went far to
gain for him the political sympathy of Campbell—the only sympathy to
which he ever frankly yielded; if, indeed, it was not the only one that he ever strongly
felt. Campbell was, in fact, a thorough republican at heart; and not
the less so for many of his other qualities, both personal and intellectual, being more or
less moulded and coloured by the aristocratic principle, and some of them being the very
quintessence of that principle.

There was another attraction in this quarter, which, as it points at a
characteristic feature in Campbell’s
idiosyncrasy, I may venture to refer to, as having exercised no little influence in making
the house in question the scene of his frequent visits, when (as during his later years)
attractions of a more intellectual character had somewhat loosened their hold upon him. The
worthy host was the father of “two fair
daughters;” one a piquante and sparkling brunette, with black eyes and raven
hair, a commanding figure, and endowed with the full complement of flirtation-power proper
to her complexion; the other, a tender, delicate, and shrinking blonde, whose winning
softness of look, and pensive repose of manner, aided by melting blue eyes and golden hair,
contrasted (almost to a pitch of strangeness) with the wild and vivacious character of her
brilliant and bewitching sister.

This united presence gave a zest to the early part of Campbell’s evenings at the house of his friend
——, which heightened by its contrast, the frank and cordial, but
coarse joviality and good-fellowship of their close: for there was a redeeming bonhommie
about the host, and a

“Total, glorious want of vile hypocrisy,”

that in some degree glossed over the open and even ostentatious profligacy of his
opinions, and the habits of life which grew out of them.

There was still another reason which took Campbell to the house of this gentleman at the time I am speaking of, which
(as it breaks no “confidences”) must not be excluded from Recollections, one
object of which is to fur-

THOMAS CAMPBELL.

107

nish materials for the private and personal
history of the literature of our time, and for correcting some of the errors and supplying
the oversights of that history. There is a work in two volumes octavo, entitled
“Life of Mrs. Siddons, by T.
Campbell, Esq.,” and another in the like form entitled “Life of Sir Thomas Lawrence, by T. Campbell,
Esq.,” both of which productions, if I am not greatly misinformed (and my
authority was the party better than any one else but Campbell himself
acquainted with the facts), were entirely prepared and composed by the gentleman above alluded to—who was an extremely rapid and
off-hand writer, and was much employed by “popular” publishers when called upon
at a pinch to supply the cravings of the literary market, on any particular topic of the
moment, before its more legitimate resources could be brought to bear. If the party in
question was to be believed, the only share the alleged author of the above-named works had
in their production was that of “overlooking” the MS., “looking
over” the proof sheets, and permitting his name to stand rubric in the title-page.

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THOMAS CAMPBELL.

The uninitiated reader must not suppose that I am disclosing any private
secrets in this case. One of the modes in which Campbell himself reconciled (both to himself and others) this necessity of
his literary and social position, was by making no mystery of the case, or caring that
others should do so. “So far as the reading public is concerned,” he
argued, “all that my name does to these works is, to stand sponsor for their
facts, dates, and so forth; and for those I think I can safely depend on ——. For the rest, I am too poor to stand upon the
critical niceties of literary casuistry. Besides, those who are fools enough to suppose
that I could write such loose, disjointed, shambling stuff, as
those books are for the most part composed of, are not worth caring about. And the rest
of the world will learn the truth, somehow or other, soon enough for the safety of my
poetical reputation, which is the only one I ever aimed
at.”

It is with a loving eye to that reputation, and a sincere belief that
Campbell himself would have thanked anybody who
had made

THOMAS CAMPBELL.

109

the disclosure thus publicly, even during his lifetime, that
I allow it to form part of these personal records of the literary history of the 19th
century.

This seems the proper place for me to notice the exactly similar case of his
(nominal) editorship of the “New Monthly
Magazine.” When a proposition was made to him through a friend, some years
before, to undertake that office, he must have felt, and, indeed, I believe, he openly
declared, that he was the last person in the world to be the conductor of what aimed at
being a “popular” literary miscellany. In temperament indolent, capricious, and
uncertain, yet hasty, sensitive, wilful, and obstinate in giving his will its way; his
habits of composition slow to a degree of painfulness; his literary taste refined, even to
fastidiousness; and, above all, his personal position as the friend and associate of nearly
all the distinguished littérateurs of the day, and his almost morbid sensitiveness on the
point of giving pain, or even displeasure, to any of them;—Campbell was, and knew himself to be, the ideal of what the

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proffered office required its occupant not to be.

On the other hand, he knew the money value of his name in the literary
market, and was too shrewd to overlook the fact that that was the
secret of the proprietor’s application to him. Moreover, he could not fail to know
that his literary position would enable him to do great good to the magazine, in the way of
attracting or procuring contributors whom no mere pecuniary considerations could attach to
such a work.

Finally, what was he to do? In this land of gold-worshippers, where money
is “the be-all and the end-all,” not only of a man’s social position, but
of his personal estimation, Campbell found himself
with an extremely small fixed income, and wholly incapable of materially adding to it by
any legitimate literary employment to which his habits would permit him to apply himself.
He made no scruple, therefore, of accepting the liberal offer that was made to him by the
proprietor (of, I believe, 600l. a year) for editorship and his own
contributions, leaving

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entirely to Campbell
himself the number and amount of the latter.

Whether or not Campbell, at the
moment of his accepting the editorship of the “New Monthly Magazine,” had formed any specific views or notions as to the
duties that were expected or required of him, or that he was capable of rendering, is
difficult to conjecture. Equally problematical is it whether the proprietor, in making the
proposition, had looked at Campbell in any other light than as the
possessor of at once the most extensive and the most unquestioned reputation of any
literary man of the day. Certain it is, however, that the first two months of the
experiment demonstrated to both parties the entire unfitness of the poet for the anything
but poetical office he had undertaken. Luckily, the same brief period had also satisfied
both parties, by the unequalled success of the experiment in a business point of view, that
the bargain was, in that respect, a fair one; and as the proprietor had taken the
precaution of providing, in case of accidents, an active and industrious working editor (in the

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person of Mr. Cyrus Redding), the arrangement continued for ten years, to the mutual
satisfaction and discontent of both parties; the public, in the meantime, caring nothing
about the matter, beyond the obtaining (as they unquestionably did) a better magazine for
their money than had ever before been produced.

Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
Scottish poet and man of letters; author of The Pleasures of Hope
(1799), Gertrude of Wyoming (1808) and lyric odes. He edited the New Monthly Magazine (1821-30).

Cyrus Redding (1785-1870)
English journalist; he was a founding member of the Plymouth Institute, edited Galignani's Messenger from 1815-18, and was the effective editor of
the New Monthly Magazine (1821-30) and The
Metropolitan (1831-33).

David Edward Williams [Publicola] (1787 c.-1846)
He published the ‘Letters of Publicola,’ in the Weekly Dispatch;
he was an acquaintance of Thomas Campbell and apparently the D. E. Williams who compiled
the The Life and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Lawrence
(1831).

New Monthly Magazine. (1814-1884). Founded in reaction to the radically-inclined Monthly Magazine,
the New Monthly was managed under the proprietorship of Henry
Colburn from 1814 to 1845. It was edited by Thomas Campbell and Cyrus Redding from
1821-1830.

Title:My Friends and Acquaintance: being Memorials, Mind-portraits, and Personal
Recollections of Deceased Celebrities of the Nineteenth Century; with Selections from their
Unpublished Letters 3 vols (London: Saunders and Otley, 1854).

Electronic Edition:

Series: Lord Byron and his Times: http://lordbyron.org

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Publisher: Center for Applied Technologies in the Humanities, Virginia Tech